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[ ♪ INTRO ] When you look up at stars in the night’s
sky, what you’re really looking at is the past.
Because the distances are so vast, light, the fastest
thing in the Universe, can take years to reach your eyes.
So the further away something is, the further in the past
you’re seeing it.
With just your eyes, you might be able to see a star as it
was a few thousand years ago.
But with sophisticated telescopes, we can see millions and
even billions of years into the past.
We can see the earliest galaxies, and compare them to
ours, and ask how our own Milky Way is likely to evolve.
And one of the people who has enabled us to see so far is
Dr. Jane Rigby.
Dr. Ribgy’s work has touched basically any famous
telescope you care to name: Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra,
Herschel, NuSTAR, Keck, Magellan, and now Webb.
As a Project Scientist for Operations on the James Webb
Space Telescope, she’s instrumental in figuring out how to
best use the amazing capabilities of this incredible
observatory.
Part of her research is focused on one of the great
mysteries in astronomy: understanding why galaxies stop
making stars.
A relatively young galaxy like ours will make a new star
every year or so.
It’s tough work, needing a lot of gas and dust to be in the right place at the right
time.
But, in order for there to be the trillions of stars that we
know there are, one per year per galaxy just wouldn’t cut it.
So maybe galaxies in the past formed more stars, quicker.
The only problem is, to see further in the past more
accurately, we need stronger telescopes.
Enter: the James Webb Space Telescope.
If you’re watching this channel we probably don’t need to
tell you about the hype surrounding this thing that is now
finally up in space, ready to start observing the universe
from its shady perch behind the Moon.
One of the first Webb telescope projects to get started is
called TEMPLATES.
That’s short for Targeting Extremely Magnified Panchromatic Lensed Arcs and Their
Extended Star Formation, in case you were wondering.
This project, led by Dr. Rigby, will use gravitational lensing to extend the view of Webb and see
even further into the past.
You see, massive objects like clusters of galaxies in
between us and distant objects bend space-time like a
lens.
That magnifies the stuff behind it, and lets us see it
with higher resolution.
With TEMPLATES, Rigby and her team will find out where
in galaxies stars are forming and if galaxies fill with stars
inside-out, or outside-in.
The team picked four galaxies that are all making stars
very quickly, but which have a mix of other properties.
For example, two are filled with a lot of dust, and the other
two are mostly dust-free.
Dust usually makes a galaxy hard to study, by obscuring
visible light and muddying the picture.
But the ultra-sensitive Webb, with its suite of
state-of-the-art filters, will be able to dig deep into the
hearts of these galaxies and reveal what’s going on.
The idea is to start with projects, like TEMPLATES, that
test out the equipment while giving valuable scientific results at the same time.
Kind of like warming up before a race by mowing the lawn.
You get warmed up and your lawn gets mowed.
The results will give us clues about how we ended up in a
galaxy that forms stars so slowly, and about the mechanisms that make galaxies stop forming
stars.
TEMPLATES will build on earlier work from Dr. Rigby,
where she was part of a team that used images from
Hubble space telescope to find out if the shape of a galaxy
affected its star formation.
In that work, they found that yes, shape does matter.
They saw that galaxies with big bulges in the middle
tend to form stars more slowly than galaxies where most
of the mass was in the disk.
These are only some of the highlights of the storied career
that landed Dr. Rigby a spot on the panel that helps decide
NASA’s scientific priorities.
Which is no small honor.
When she’s not uncovering the secrets of the stars, Dr.
Rigby is also a passionate advocate for LGBTQ+ people in
astronomy.
In 2022 she was recognized as LGBTQ+ Scientist of the Year by Out to Innovate,
a professional organization for LGBTQ+ scientists.
In an interview with the American Astronomical Society, Dr.
Rigby talked about how being queer has made her a better
astronomer.
In part, she puts that down to her experience as an
outsider.
She says: “I think about science in terms of
community-building.
What team do we need to tackle a given science problem, with skills that are
different from mine?”
She adds: “I think that way because I’m an outsider,
because I’ve been marginalized.
And because community-building is central to LGBTQ culture.”
Her number one lesson for aspiring young astronomers?
“Do fabulous science, be fabulous, and be proud.”
You heard the lady.
Get out there and do fabulous science.
Dr. Rigby is changing the game as an LGBTQ+ advocate
at NASA.
It’s so awesome that NASA is recognizing their
diverse workforce because representation matters.
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[ ♪ OUTRO ]